The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

Product Details

The Presidents Club, established at Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration by Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover, is a complicated place: its members are bound forever by the experience of the Oval Office and yet are eternal rivals for history’s favor. Among their secrets: How Jack Kennedy tried to blame Ike for the Bay of Pigs. How Ike quietly helped Reagan win his first race in 1966. How Richard Nixon conspired with Lyndon Johnson to get elected and then betrayed him. How Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter turned a deep enmity into an alliance. The unspoken pact between a father and son named Bush. And the roots of the rivalry between Clinton and Barack Obama.

Time magazine editors and presidential historians Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy offer a new and revealing lens on the American presidency, exploring the club as a hidden instrument of power that has changed the course of history.

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Reviews

Rated 5 out of
5 by
David_Cavaco from
Topnotch Book!Well-written, fast-paced, entertaining and anectodal book about the inter-relationships between Presidents. The chapters involving Harry Truman and Eisenhower were especially entertaining and Nixon was way too intense. Despite its length, the book is a quick read. Loved it!

Date published: 2013-07-31

Rated out of
5 by
Anonymous from
A excellent, engaging and insightful book spoiled by the poor quality paper it is printed on!

The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

The following ISBNs are associated with this title:

ISBN - 10: 1439127700

ISBN - 13: 9781439127704

About the Book

A riveting new history of the private relationships among the last 13 presidents, uncovers and explores the partnerships, private deals, rescue missions, and rivalries of those few men who served as commander in chief.

Read from the Book

The Presidents Club INTRODUCTION So you’ve come to talk about my predecessors.” Bill Clinton greets us in his Harlem office, looking thin, sounding thin, his voice a scrape of welcome at the end of a long day. It is late, it is dark, pouring rain outside, so beyond the wall of windows the city is a splash of watery lights and street noise. But inside, past the two armed agents, behind the electronic locks, the sanctuary is warm wood and deep carpet, a collector’s vault. A painting of Churchill watches from the west wall; a stuffed Kermit the Frog rests on a shelf, while a hunk of an old voting machine, with names attached and levers to pull, sits behind his desk. “This is my presidential library, from Washington through Bush,” he says, pointing to bookcases full of memoirs and biographies, and in the course of the séance that follows he summons the ghosts not just of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt but Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes. He dwells on one president he misses—Richard Nixon—and another that he loves: George H. W. Bush. “A month to the day before he died,” he says of Nixon, “he wrote me a letter about Russia. And it was so lucid, so well written. . . . I reread it every year. That one and George Bush’s wonderful letter to me, you know where you leave your letter to your successor.” That was the letter that said, “You will be our President when you read this

From the Publisher

The Presidents Club, established at Dwight Eisenhower&#8217;s inauguration by Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover, is a complicated place: its members are bound forever by the experience of the Oval Office and yet are eternal rivals for history&#8217;s favor. Among their secrets: How Jack Kennedy tried to blame Ike for the Bay of Pigs. How Ike quietly helped Reagan win his first race in 1966. How Richard Nixon conspired with Lyndon Johnson to get elected and then betrayed him. How Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter turned a deep enmity into an alliance. The unspoken pact between a father and son named Bush. And the roots of the rivalry between Clinton and Barack Obama.

Time magazine editors and presidential historians Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy offer a new and revealing lens on the American presidency, exploring the club as a hidden instrument of power that has changed the course of history.

About the Author

Nancy Gibbs is an executive editor of Time magazine and coauthor with Michael Duffy of the New York Times bestseller The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House. Michael Duffy is Time&#8217;s Washington bureau chief and directs coverage of presidents, politics, and national affairs for the magazine.

Editorial Reviews

&#8220;With research in presidential papers and the published record, this is a fascinating and fun read that will appeal to political junkies and history buffs alike. Highly recommended.&#8221; &#8212;Library Journal